Darryl Cooper Admits to Fabricating a Quote, but then Fabricates a New One — and Other Hilarities

After his initial crybaby outburst, Darryl Cooper proclaimed that he would not be addressing me any further. “Lose my number, email address, and the rest of it because this is the last communication you’ll get out of me,” he petulantly whined, as though we were both contestants on The Real Housewives of Twitter and I’d just committed some unforgivable personal infraction against him. Rather than comment on a single substantive issue I raised, he instead chose to comment derisively on my fashion style — in keeping with the new Real Housewives theme. He also called me “rude” and “classless,” a practitioner of poor email etiquette, and a “cynical gossip columnist” because I had the audacity to send him an extremely straightforward journalistic inquiry related to his public work output, regarding the subject that he was being hailed as a nationally-celebrated expert on, and about which he was brought forward by one of the biggest podcasts in America to educate the masses. As of August 31, 2025, his Tucker Carlson episode has 4.5 million impressions on X, and over 2.3 million views on YouTube. If anyone can figure out how to tabulate the total number of downloads and streams it’s received on other platforms, please let me know, because I’m sure we can estimate the overall number upward by at least several million.

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I was out yesterday afternoon when Cooper suddenly tweeted at me announcing he’d apparently had second thoughts, and was lifting his self-imposed moratorium on any further communications with me, by publishing a much longer response to my criticisms on Substack. Another seemingly erratic about-face from Cooper, I thought, but fine — let’s dig into the actual substance, rather than debating my “tone” and wardrobe, as Cooper had chosen to do the previous day. So I skimmed the article on my phone at first, as someone had also forwarded the email version to me, and I responded briefly to his tweet, pledging to soon produce a longer response of my own.

Tweeters then began notifying me that Cooper appeared to have mostly cribbed the “substantive” portion of his Substack response from a Twitter/X thread authored by someone called @Villgecrazylady. Cooper seemed to acknowledge he had in fact done this, and posted a tweet lauding the CrazyLady’s thread, while also giving a strange rationalization for why he made no citation of the thread in the text of his Substack article — despite having overwhelmingly relied on it for the material that comprised his long-awaited “response.”

Here is a PDF copy of Cooper’s article, which was sent to me by email. I’m preserving the original in case any changes are made to the web version:

Weirdly, despite titling his Substack article “a response to Michael Tracey,” Cooper forgot to include a link to my actual article detailing the many factual misstatements and falsehoods that he’d recently disseminated to an audience of millions. Must’ve just been another innocent oversight on his part. Cooper does say that before the Tucker podcast, he was “running on 40 hours without a wink of sleep (air travel issues)” and “wouldn’t have been surprised to learn” that he “misspoke or mixed some things up.” Notice how the weird, overly personalized emotional blackmail continues; now we’re all supposed to have sympathy for Cooper being sleep-deprived as he heroically hustled over to Tucker’s studio for the Emergency Epstein Podcast. If he “misspoke” or “mixed some things up” under these trying conditions, we’re supposed to completely understand.

At the beginning of his “response,” Cooper describes me as “social media poster Michael Tracey.” While it’s true that I post on social media, I principally consider myself a “journalist,” which I know is a term that Cooper himself shies away from, instead embracing the moniker of “audio documentary maker” — whatever that means exactly. And look, I’m not emotionally invested in the word “journalist” or anything. It’s just funny how Cooper uses this petty little swipe to trivialize and degrade, as though I’m somebody who’s so obviously not worth his time, even though he posted his weepy little outburst against me on Friday, and then posted this entire Substack article on Saturday — all prompted by me. He also sprinkles in more Middle School-tier insults, mocking me as “some slob in a wrinkled t-shirt” who should consider myself lucky that he won’t come over and kick the shit out of me, given how “pushy” he claims I got with him. Because where Darryl grew up, he says, if “another man” ever insulted him as gravely as I did by sending him a few emails, that man would get his freakin’ ass kicked.

“I won’t speculate about why Tracey has now dedicated weeks of his life to running cover for alleged pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein,” Cooper says — totally not insinuating anything at all about what secret, depraved motives I must be concealing. More interestingly, though, notice that Cooper has now apparently downgraded Jeffrey Epstein to “alleged pedophile.” On the Tucker podcast last month, Cooper had no reservations about declaring authoritatively that Epstein was the orchestrator of a “mass pedophile ring” — and lamenting that all the powerful people undoubtedly implicated in Epstein’s vast pedo operation were getting away scot-free. So what’s with the sudden injection of humility? Like Darryl, I will decline to speculate.

Anyway, I started reading further into Cooper’s surprise Substack article. And something quickly stood out. Darryl claims he caught me being “wrong” about an important detail:

I thought to myself: Gee whiz, if I was careless enough to have written that “The only time Alex Acosta was ever asked directly about Epstein being an intelligence asset, he said ‘the answer is no,’” I would for sure want to correct that. Because I’ve long been fully aware that Acosta gave a lengthy press conference on July 10, 2019, in which he was in fact asked, by Richard Lardner of the Associated Press, “Were you ever made aware at any point in your handling of this case if Mr. Epstein was an intelligence asset of some sort?” And Acosta proceeded to give an answer that some perceived as evasive, even as he denied the veracity of the public reporting which had led some to suspect that Epstein was an “intelligence asset.”

I’d just re-watched this entire press conference a few weeks ago, and was thus very much familiar with the interaction in question. Whenever I have mentioned Acosta’s statement in the November 2020 DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report on Jeffrey Epstein, I have tried to emphasize that what distinguishes this statement is that it’s the only known instance in which Acosta directly addressed — under oath, and under penalty of perjury — whether he had any knowledge that Epstein was an “intelligence asset” during the time Acosta oversaw the negotiation of Epstein’s 2007-2008 federal Non-Prosecution Agreement in Florida.

Which is why I was concerned to be informed by Darryl Cooper that I had at some point written, erroneously, “The only time Alex Acosta was ever asked directly about Epstein being an intelligence asset, he said ‘the answer is no.’” If there was somewhere I had written this, I would be eager to make a swift correction or clarification. I thought to myself, Where could I have written this? Because Darryl is directly quoting me here. So I double-checked all my Substack articles that make any reference to Acosta. Sure enough, none contain the sentence Darryl was quoting me as having written. I checked every tweet of mine that made reference to Acosta, and nowhere does that sentence appear. I even went back and checked my August 28 livestream with Thaddeus Russell that Darryl got so huffy about, even though Darryl claims I “wrote” the sentence in question. You can read the full transcript of the relevant portion here: I never said anything like what Cooper attributed to me.

So where did this sentence that I supposedly “wrote” even come from? Ah, we have an answer. It comes from the thread by the CrazyLady that Cooper had cribbed.

CrazyLady makes up a non-existent quote from me, even as she helpfully appends a legitimate screenshot from my actual article — in which I wrote something entirely different. Here’s what I actually “wrote” in the article:

Apparently, despite Cooper fastidiously “researching” in the “Epstein Space” for more than a decade, he never got around to checking if there might be any countervailing evidence in the public record. Cooper’s refutation of the interjection by Tucker’s assistant strongly indicates that he had no clue whatsoever about the November 2020 DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report on Jeffrey Epstein, which contains the only direct, on-record, under-oath statement from Acosta addressing Epstein’s purported ties to intelligence. Asked if he had knowledge that Epstein was an “intelligence asset” at the time of the Florida plea negotiations, Acosta replied, under penalty of perjury, “The answer is no.”

So, in conclusion, Cooper has peddled yet another fabricated quote — this time in writing — and attributed it to me, apparently based on his un-cited cribbing of a random Twitter/X thread, in which the author invented the non-existent quote. Darryl, ever a careful researcher, then apparently did nothing to authenticate the veracity of the quote, and instead just copy-and-pasted it into his Substack article, so he could declare me to have been “wrong” about something — even though I had never written the sentence he claims I wrote. Amazing stuff.

Cooper’s circulation of yet another fabricated quote is consistent with one of the concessions that he appears to make in the Substack “response” — which is that he did indeed fabricate a non-existent quote from a federal judge in his Tucker Carlson appearance. Cooper writes:

I’ll start with the gotcha he seems most proud of, namely, that I stated in the Tucker interview that, in February 2019, federal judge Kenneth A. Marra ruled that federal prosecutors had engaged in a conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team to violate the rights of Epstein’s victims during the 2000s investigation that led to his initial arrest and conviction.

Cooper is just completely incorrigible, it’s astonishing. First of all, to dismiss the point I raised here as nothing more than a frivolous “gotcha” is laughable. Anyone who considers themselves to be anything close to a “journalist” — or even just considers themselves to have some basic obligation to remain tethered to factual reality, especially when they’re pontificating in front of millions — would regard making up a non-existent quote from a federal judge as something that would be horribly discrediting, and at the very least, require an immediate correction.

On the Tucker podcast, Cooper never specifically “stated” that federal judge Kenneth A. Marra ruled anything. Cooper never uttered Marra’s name on Tucker’s podcast. He is doing so here, well after the fact, because the Twitter/X thread from which he is cribbing happens to delve into Marra’s 2019 opinion in order to make some sort of harebrained counter-argument against me. I’m the one who brought up Kenneth A. Marra’s ruling in my original article. Worse, Cooper is continuing to embellish and misstate his own statements. On the podcast, Cooper didn’t merely “state” that an alleged federal judge had said that federal prosecutors “engaged in a conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team to violate the rights of Epstein’s victims during the 2000s investigation that led to his initial arrest and conviction.”

As a reminder, here is what Cooper did say, as recounted in my article:

“And eventually a federal judge found,” Cooper says — making a point to underscore for emphasis, “these are the words of the federal judge” — that “the government… had engaged in a conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein to make this deal. This illegitimate, illegal deal.” As a result, Cooper claims, the deal had been judicially “stricken.”

Cooper admits that the judge never used the word “conspire” in this context — and thus admits to inventing the non-existent quote. But then he tries to make it seem as though I’m just trivially nit-picking, because the judge basically said what Cooper falsely quoted him as saying:

He’s right, the judge did not use the word “conspire,” he merely ruled that that [sic] federal prosecutors had secretly colluded with Epstein’s legal team to conceal the details of Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement from his victims, in violation of the law and the victims’ rights.

But what Cooper falsely stated on Tucker’s podcast was that the judge declared the Non-Prosecution Agreement “illegal” and ‘illegitimate,” and had judicially nullified the entire NPA on that basis — which never happened. The NPA remains in effect to this day. It was never declared “illegal” by any federal judge, including Marra, or in any judicial ruling. It was certainly never “stricken,” as Cooper falsely claimed on the podcast. Cooper is revising what he claimed to comport more with Marra’s actual ruling, which I doubt Cooper ever bothered to read in the first place, despite going on a podcast in front of millions and purporting to quote from it. (Although he never specified which judge or ruling he was quoting from on that podcast. This seems to have been retrofitted for his convenience, thanks to the CrazyLady’s thread.)

I spelled out exactly what Marra did rule in my original article:

Cooper was possibly referring to a February 21, 2019 ruling by District Court judge Kenneth A. Marra, who found that the federal government had violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA) by not providing what the judge deemed sufficient advance notice to “victims” ahead of Epstein’s state-level guilty plea in Florida, on June 30, 2008. But Marra never accused the government of “conspiring” with Jeffrey Epstein. “The Court is not ruling that the decision not to prosecute was improper,” Marra wrote. “The Court is simply ruling that, under the facts of this case, there was a violation of the victims rights under the CVRA.” In other words, Judge Marra found that the government had failed to provide adequate notice to government-designated victims under the CVRA, a statute signed into law by George W. Bush in 2004, only about a year before the initial Palm Beach criminal investigation of Epstein commenced. Marra did not rule that Epstein’s Non-Prosecution Agreement was “illegitimate” or “illegal,” and Marra certainly never decreed that the NPA was therefore “stricken” — despite Cooper falsely claiming such on the podcast. It simply never happened.

Marra ruled that the government had violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act — not that the NPA itself was illegal, or illegitimate, or invalidated. It’s a completely distinct issue. (Which I guess I should write about at greater length sometime, because the idea that the government has an affirmative obligation to provide certain relief to certain individuals it designates as “victims” — before a defendant has even been convicted or pleaded guilty, and before the “victimhood” of these individuals has even been adversarially adjudicated — is yet another civil liberties nightmare that Epstein mythologists and Pedo Panic Peddlers like Cooper have “normalized.”) In any event, as I pointed out in my article, Marra’s ruling on this completely distinct issue was subsequently overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, a notable fact that Cooper apparently forgot to mention in his sniveling “response.”

“I’m not a lawyer,” Cooper concedes. “I apparently said that Judge Marra’s 2019 ruling invalidated the 2007 non-prosecution agreement… that wasn’t exactly right.” Hey Darryl, I’m not a lawyer either. I’m just a “social media poster,” as you put it. And yet my lack of formal Bar membership has somehow never hindered my ability to actually read through the judicial rulings associated with the Jeffrey Epstein case, so as to understand what was actually ruled upon — rather than just make up a bunch of stuff to tantalize my low-info followers. And yet, Cooper continues to insist that he was spiritually right about this legal issue. Though the NPA wasn’t invalidated, Cooper now acknowledges — despite previously claiming it had been judicially “stricken” on Tucker’s podcast — he now maintains that Marra’s ruling (which Cooper never previously cited) had nonetheless “got the ball rolling” on the NPA’s “invalidation,” and therefore Cooper contends he’s essentially right, even if as a humble non-lawyer he might’ve been fuzzy on the details. “That is why,” Cooper says, “just five months after Judge Marra’s ruling, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed new charges against Epstein, some of which were the exact same charges brought in 2007, which had stayed on the shelf until 2019 because they’d previously been covered under the non-prosecution agreement.”

Again: this is just wrong. Like, demonstrably wrong, as anyone who reads through the relevant court documents can easily discover.

I dutifully provided a link to the relevant court document in my previous article, which Cooper mysteriously did not link to. But lawyers and non-lawyers alike can still read the pre-trial motions after Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, in which the government presented arguments as to why it contended that Epstein could be federally prosecuted in 2019, notwithstanding the 2007-2008 federal Non-Prosecution Agreement — which remained in effect.

As you can see, Geoffrey S. Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, argues that the new indictment against Epstein contains charged conduct that is “well beyond the scope of the NPA” — namely that the newly charged offenses had allegedly occurred in New York, rather than Florida, which is the jurisdiction where the NPA was seen to be applicable. In other words, the NPA was not “invalidated,” or “stricken” as Cooper falsely put it on the Tucker podcast — the prosecutors were merely presenting arguments to claim that the NPA was not applicable to the new 2019 charges they had brought against Epstein. If the NPA had somehow been “invalidated,” or even if Marra’s February 2019 ruling had merely “got the ball rolling on its invalidation” — and thus enabled the bringing of new federal charges in July 2019, thanks to this “ball” having gotten “rolling” — top SDNY prosecutor Berman and his underlings like Maurene Comey would not have had to make highly technical semantic and jurisdictional arguments about the exact wording of the NPA:

In fact, Berman et al. argued that the terms of the NPA had always allowed for Epstein to be charged with additional crimes related to his decade-plus old conduct, because the precise wording purportedly showed that the parties who negotiated the NPA “contemplated possible criminal prosecutions in other jurisdictions… based on victims not initially identified in the Florida investigations.”

In other words, these prosecutors were arguing that the NPA, despite still being in effect as of July 2019, was no barrier to federally indicting Epstein. Not that it had been “invalidated,” or “stricken,” or deemed “illegal” by a federal judge, or that the “ball” had vaguely gotten “rolling” toward the NPA’s prospective invalidation. The Feds were arguing that Epstein could be re-prosecuted even if the NPA remained totally valid. And indeed, it remains valid to this day — given that Ghislaine Maxwell has an appeal actively pending before the Supreme Court related to the applicability of the NPA to her own prosecution.

Again, I realize it’s a huge stretch for such a renowned and diligent “researcher” as Cooper to actually bother “researching” this extremely boring stuff, instead of just cribbing from some random X thread — but I’m not the one who anointed Cooper an expositor of unparalleled knowledge and wisdom in the “Epstein Space.” We do know that his 10+ years of voluminous Epstein “research” has impelled him to spend a ton of time researching “PizzaGate” — including sizzling hot leads such as how “citizen investigators” used their collective “decoder ring” to determine that the word “hotdog” actually referred to child-sex slaves held captive in a Washington, DC restaurant.

Even in this one little paragraph by Cooper, the source for which seems to be the Twitter/X thread by the CrazyLady, he misstates and distorts claim after claim. There weren’t any federal “charges brought” against Epstein in 2007, as he falsely states. That was the whole point of the federal Non-Prosecution Agreement — to preclude federal charges from being “brought” against Epstein, so long as he agreed to plead guilty to two state-level charges in Florida. Which he eventually did. What Cooper might be referring to in his typically muddled and factually-bereft manner was that a federal prosecutor in Alex Acosta’s office, Marie Villafaña, did draw up a draft indictment in May 2007, along with an accompanying prosecution memo, which was then used as leverage against Epstein and his defense counsel to pressure them into accepting the NPA — otherwise Epstein could face an outright federal indictment in due course. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in its 2020 opinion overturning Judge Marra’s 2019 ruling on the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, describes this sequence of events in general terms:

“The draft indictment prepared by Villafaña proposed charging Epstein with a variety of federal crimes relating to sexual conduct with and trafficking of minors,” according to the 2020 DOJ OPR report. To my knowledge, the full draft indictment has not been made available for public inspection, but I’m happy to be proven wrong about that. Does Darryl Cooper have a copy he can share, so we can know on what basis he claims this draft indictment includes the “exact same charges” that were later brought in 2019? I have pending FOIA requests with the DOJ for additional materials related to the 2020 OPR report, but I’d welcome anyone who might want to help out in obtaining these and other pertinent records.

Anyway, Epstein signed the NPA on September 24, 2007 — but then he and his defense lawyers delayed his entering a guilty plea pursuant to the terms of the NPA. These delay tactics stretched on for many months, while Epstein’s well-connected and politically-influential legal team (including Alan Dershowitz, Ken Starr, Jay Lefkowitz, and Roy Black) tried every which way to challenge the final implementation of the NPA (to be trigged by the guilty plea), including by appealing up the chain of command at the Justice Department in Washington, DC. By May 19, 2008, Starr even made an entreaty by letter to the Deputy Attorney General, Mark Filip, whereby Starr argued that the federal government had no rightful jurisdiction over the alleged Florida offenses at issue, because there was no inter-state nexus. Other extraneous arguments to undermine the federal intercession against Epstein were also proposed by Starr, one of which in particular had a hilarious historical irony: Starr warned there were “profound questions raised by the unprecedented extension of federal laws … to a prominent public figure who has close ties to President Clinton.” In other words, Starr was trying to invoke Epstein’s political association with Bill Clinton to suggest that Epstein was being unjustly targeted by George W. Bush’s Justice Department. This after Starr had notoriously hounded Clinton as an Independent Counsel in the 1990s, which ultimately triggered public disclosure of the Monica Lewinsky affair, followed by Clinton’s 1998 impeachment.

Whatever the amusing historical and political ironies, Filip rejected Starr’s arguments in relation to Epstein, and allowed the federal intercession (by Acosta) to continue unimpeded. On June 23, 2008, notice that the Deputy AG had rejected Starr’s arguments was transmitted directly to Starr, and immediately, the prosecutor in Acosta’s office who had drawn up the earlier draft indictment against Epstein, Marie Villafaña, “notified defense counsel that Epstein would have until close of business on Monday, June 30, 2008, to comply with the NPA by entering his guilty plea, being sentenced, and surrendering to begin serving his sentence” — otherwise he would face federal indictment. Epstein, having no further recourse, did in fact enter his guilty plea on June 30, 2008. (For details on all this, see the 2020 DOJ OPR report, pages 108-110.)

So who the hell knows what Cooper is even talking about when he claims that in 2019, “prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed new charges against Epstein, some of which were the exact same charges brought in 2007, which had stayed on the shelf until 2019 because they’d previously been covered under the non-prosecution agreement.” He’s all over the place. He doesn’t do any legitimate “research.” He cribs from random Twitter/X threads, and then has his low-info followers clap like seals for his supposed courage to defy “establishment” orthodoxies — which in Cooper’s world appears to include vaguely supporting the current Republican president. In the nearly 3-hour podcast with Tucker on July 17, 2025, Cooper has nary an unkind word to say about Donald J. Trump — who, according to Cooper’s weird half-baked worldview, would now be centrally responsible for covering up what Cooper describes as a still-unexposed “mass pedophile ring” masterminded by Epstein. In the past, Cooper has bought into the lore that Trump is actually the unappreciated hero in this whole story, insisting that Trump “banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago for inappropriate behavior toward another guest’s daughter” — a recurring slice of mythology for which there’s never been any hard evidence, and which Trump himself has recently contradicted, claiming that he fell out with Epstein over a much more banal dispute involving Epstein allegedly poaching Trump’s staff from Mar-a-Lago. Cooper says to Tucker on the podcast, “I just don’t personally buy into the accusations of Trump having to do with Epstein — just doesn’t strike me as the personality type that would do that kind of thing.”

Based on his impression of Trump’s “personality type,” Cooper exonerates him from any child-sex wrongdoing vis-a-vis Epstein — despite Trump’s well-documented 10 or 15 year relationship with Epstein, in which they’re in endless photos and videos together partying with young attractive women. And even though Trump’s name is on numerous flight logs aboard the so-called “Lolita Express,” as Cooper calls it. And even though Trump and Epstein both traveled in the same New York / Palm Beach social circles that were flush with aspiring young models — Trump as the proprietor of such ventures as the “Miss Teen USA” pageant, and Epstein with his close business and personal relationship to Leslie Wexner, the mega-billionaire owner of Victoria’s Secret. I’m not saying that I personally accuse Trump of any sexual wrongdoing in relation to Epstein. But if you’re going to be a professional dot-connector like Cooper — constantly “researching” new dots to scandalously connect, no matter how tenuous or spurious — it makes no sense to arbitrarily immunize Trump from this dot-connecting exercise, given that he really did have a well-established relationship with Epstein. Trump’s name was circled on the infamous so-called “Little Black Book,” and Epstein’s one-time houseman said in a deposition that Trump would leave phone messages for Epstein at the Palm Beach property. If you’re already a passionate dot-connector, it’s inexplicable that you’d just randomly decide not to connect these particular dots.

Especially if, like Cooper, you’re eager to falsely impugn Bill Clinton for Epstein-related malfeasance. In his big “response to Michael Tracey” post, Cooper did not address the question I posed to him about whether he had any evidence that Clinton flew on Epstein’s jet, or visited Epstein’s island, after 2009. Because when Tucker asked Cooper to name some prominent individuals who disgracefully continued to associate with Epstein after his 2008-2009 incarceration, Cooper didn’t hesitate to name Bill Clinton — even though there’s zero credible evidence that Clinton ever associated with Epstein after 2005. There are prominent individuals who Cooper could’ve named that did in fact continue to associate with Epstein after 2009 — like Peter Thiel, or Bill Gates, or Ehud Barak, or Noam Chomsky. But instead of giving Tucker an accurate answer to the question, Cooper decided to falsely throw out the name Bill Clinton. All while Cooper is also arguing that there’s no reason to believe Trump is implicated in any personal wrongdoing. Hmmmm. Really makes you think.

In the big response article, Cooper conveniently omitted any mention of the question I asked him about his Bill Clinton claim. He also ignored my question to him about Trump. As a reminder, here are the two relevant questions I put to him in my initial “aggressive” email, which got him so flustered and traumatized:

• Tucker asks you to name specific people who were “hanging with” Epstein “on his plane” or “on the island” after 2008 or 2009, following Epstein’s guilty plea in Florida. You respond by citing Bill Clinton. But Clinton maintains that he had no further contact with Epstein after 2005 [SEE BELOW] — and records show the last flight Clinton took on Epstein’s jet was either in 2002 or 2003. Clinton also maintains he never visited the island. Do you have any evidence that Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane, or visited Epstein’s island, after Epstein’s June 2008 entry of a guilty plea in Florida?

• You said in 2021, “If you get tired of my Epstein posting, too bad, I’m blowing this horn until I run out of breath or the walls of Jericho come down. THEY RAPED CHILDREN. And they want us to forget about it. Follow people like @Cernovich, @EricRWeinstein, and trust no one who cucks on this issue.” Do you now consider Donald Trump to have “cucked” on this issue — therefore warranting your distrust? As I’m sure you know, Trump has repeatedly referred to the entire Epstein matter as a “hoax” and “bullshit.”

Cooper ignored both these questions, among many others. For instance, I asked Cooper when he started working for the Department of Defense, and when he departed. Was he producing “Martyr Made” podcasts as a DOD employee? He ignored that question. I asked him exactly when, and for what purpose, he traveled to Israel and stayed there for a total of 6-8 months, while working on unspecified “joint air & ballistic missile defense projects.” Did he ever interface with any Israeli intelligence assets during this time? No answer. I asked him why he almost completely neglected any mention of Virginia Giuffre in his discussion with Tucker, especially since the podcast was meant to serve as a kind of introductory primer for the masses on Epstein. Given that Giuffre has absolutely gigantic credibility problems, and she’s the one who originally introduced the whole sprawling pedo-ring and blackmail theory, this seemed like some noteworthy information Cooper might’ve shared. No answer. I asked him why he said that the government had always told us there was no video surveillance footage from Epstein’s cell block on the date of his death in August 2019, even though the DOJ Inspector General and then-Attorney General Bill Barr had said this footage existed for years before Cooper frantically rushed over to Tucker’s podcast. No answer. I asked him why he claimed there was some dark “mystery” surrounding the 2012 death of right-wing media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, and then tried to connect this “mystery” to PizzaGate — the only subject on which it’s obvious that Cooper really did do a great deal of deep research. No answer. I asked him how he knew that “friends” of Jeffrey Epstein had given his private plane the nickname “Lolita Express,” even though the nickname appears to have been invented by a dopey British tabloid. No answer.

I know this post is getting really long, and I’ve already been over the whole Acosta thing ad nauseam, but here Cooper inserts something that’s subtly indicative of his whole specious approach:

In the example Tracey brought up, Acosta was not at a press conference, but across the table from an Inspector General investigating his handling of the case. Tracey relates the exchange accurately, noting that Acosta was asked if he had knowledge, at the time the deal was made, that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset, and that Acosta replied, “The answer is no.” Tracey thinks this means Acosta denied that Epstein was an intelligence asset, and that’s fine, it’s a fair interpretation if made in good faith, but I disagree. Understand that this is not an informal discussion.

First of all, it was not the DOJ “Inspector General” who produced the 2020 report, but the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility. This is admittedly a minor factual issue, and one I wouldn’t necessarily make a point to blast Cooper on — but the minor issues do pile up, especially in conjunction with the much more egregious issues I’ve also documented. And eventually, it becomes untenable for anyone to rationally place even a hint of implicit trust in this guy to adhere to basic standards of factual fidelity. (He also misspells “Vicky Ward” as “Vicki Ward.”)

But much more annoyingly, Cooper purports to opine on what I, Michael Tracey, must “think” — as though I merely “think” that Acosta’s statement to OPR investigators “means Acosta denied that Epstein was an intelligence asset.” It has nothing to do with what I personally “think.” Every time I have referenced this quote, I have simply tried to recite what Acosta was reported to have said, in response to the question that he was reported to have been asked. According to the report, Acosta was asked if he had knowledge that Epstein was an “intelligence asset.” Acosta replies, “the answer is no.” That’s it. That’s all I’ve ever relayed. Cooper concocting a version of my argument based on what he claims I must personally “think” is just obnoxious — and subtly reflective of him needing to turn everything into some weird personal psychodrama, as though we’re both supposed to be mind-reading one another’s interior thoughts or something. The only thing I’ve done is examine Cooper’s public work output and then send him some straightforward journalistic inquiries about that output. He couldn’t help but turn the whole thing into a messy emotional meltdown.

Toward the end of his much-anticipated Substack response, Cooper whines that he’s “already wasted enough of our time responding to someone I consider to be a classless, bad-faith actor” — meaning me, Michael Tracey. But he just can’t resist pointing out another thing that I, Michael Tracey, have allegedly said which was so exceptionally “egregious” that it exposes me as a “liar” — or at least as someone “who hasn’t been following the case [of Jeffrey Epstein] very closely.” (LOL)

Cooper tries to claim that somehow, somewhere I have argued that the “federal officials” like Acosta who were involved in brokering the 2007-2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement “are the real heroes of the story.” But “this is just factually wrong,” Cooper says, “and you don’t have to pore through obscure legal documents to know it. You can just watch the Netflix documentary series about Epstein, and you get it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

I have never claimed anything like this. Again, it’s just made up. He constantly makes stuff up. He could’ve just quoted where I purportedly said anything remotely like this — that I considered Alex Acosta and other “federal officials” to be the “heroes” in the Epstein story. But he conspicuously included no such quote, because I never said it. And I obviously would never say such an asinine thing. He’s claiming to have shown me as “factually wrong” about a statement I have never come close to ever making, anywhere. (This claim seems to also derive from @Villagecrazylady’s hallucinated X thread.) Furthermore, even if I did want to argue that these “federal officials” were the “real heroes” in the Jeffrey Epstein story, and Cooper disagreed, how would this hypothetical subjective disagreement establish that I’d been “factually wrong” about anything? That doesn’t make sense. Regardless, the point is moot, because I have never said anything like this, and don’t believe anything like this. It’s notable, however, that Cooper contends “you don’t have to pore through obscure legal documents” to know things about the Jeffrey Epstein case. Certainly it would appear that Cooper, the Master Researcher and legendary “audio documentary maker,” has never wasted much time with trifling tasks such as reading “obscure legal documents” before he spouts off to millions. Because instead, he says, you can just switch on Netflix. That’s so perfect. Thank you, Darryl.

Cooper finally concludes his big Substack article with yet another barrage of personal insults. He calls me “a low-class, tactless dirtbag.” He proclaims himself “tired of politics,” as though I have personally soured him on the entire genre of “politics.” He emphasizes how tired he is of “all this bad-faith, vulgar bickering. I’m tired of the nastiness, the hostility, the vulgarity. I’m tired of having to be exposed to people like Michael Tracey.”

I’M SO TIRED!!!! Hmm, sounds familiar. This is basically the same formulation that emotionally unstable POC journalists would constantly screech during the 2020 George Floyd riots to browbeat their hapless media colleagues into submission:

It’s hilarious that vaguely Dissident Right tough-guys like Darryl Cooper are so eager to replicate, virtually identically, these kinds of emotional-manipulation tactics. But alright: I’m sorry that you’re SOOOOO TIRED, Darryl! Would you like a baby bottle?

Because on Friday, Darryl cried about how I viciously “bombarded” him with “confrontational emails, texts, and phone calls.” So I posted the stupid emails, as well as the entirety of my communications with him, just to prove what a giant drama queen he is.

He ridiculed me for wearing a t-shirt, accused me of just “engagement farming,” condemned my “aggressive tone,” did this whole creepy schoolmarm routine about how he never liked “the way I conducted myself,” called me a “rude, classless operator,” pouted that I’m a “cynical gossip columnist” who maliciously exploited and abused his family, and said I should “lose his number, email address, and the rest of it” — because that was the last time I was ever going to get any kind of communication out of him. Then, like the emotionally volatile “audio documentary maker” he apparently is, Cooper decided to communicate with me the very next day. Part of this surprise communication entailed reproducing a fabricated quote by me, so he could declare how “wrong” I was based on the made-up sentence he claimed I wrote. But at least he’s consistent in this area, having finally admitted to fabricating the quote from a federal judge, which is what I initially brought to his attention in the first place with my shockingly cruel email that seemed to rattle him to his core.

“And Michael,” Cooper concludes in the Substack article, “because I know a narcissist has to read every word written about him, the next time you hear from me will be… never.” Right, so now I’m a “narcissist” because I’m reading the “response to Michael Tracey”-headlined article that Cooper published, and then tweeted at me. But he vows that the next time I hear from him will be “never” (just like he said on Friday.) OK, Darryl. Don’t worry, I’m not looking to continuously “hear from you.” At this point I think I’ve heard just about everything I need to know.

This guy is such a master manipulator. His sourcing and research methods are absolutely farcical. In response to my allegation that he had fabricated a quote from a federal judge, he ended up peddling yet another fabricated quote, this time in text form, without doing two seconds of checking to see if the quote was even real. He just copy-and-pasted some Twitter thread.

He engages with criticism by launching into an emotional blackmail crusade that is truly a carbon copy of the tactics employed circa Summer 2020 by “traumatized” and “tired” 26-year-olds in the online media “space.” Which apparently bears many similarities to what Darryl endearingly calls the “Epstein Space.” By the way, weren’t all these Dissident Right guys supposed to embody rectitude, stoicism, traditional masculinity, etc. — in defiance of the “feminization” that they complain is overtaking every other political and cultural institution? Because no offense to women in general, but I’ve never seen a more stereotypically “feminine” response to anything than Cooper’s weepy, incoherent outburst over the past several days.

Finally, as someone who’s on record as very much in favor of a healthy dose of long-overdue “revisionism” when it comes to World War II — having taken a ton of heat myself for this position, after I wrote a series of articles a few years ago that were hysterically denounced as dangerously “revisionist” to the point of willful malevolence — I’d be the last person to reflexively attack Cooper or anybody else for “revisionism” with respect to popular WWII history. Which too often can be better described as WWII “mythology,” in my view — hence the need for a “revisionist” correction. I support such corrective action. I’ve done it myself, and plan to do more in the future.

But it has to be rational corrective action. It has to be methodologically sound, empirically rigorous, willing to engage openly with criticism. It can’t just chronically make stuff up. It can’t throw an extended hissy fit over “rude” emails. It can’t reduce every substantive dispute to petty, sputtering melodrama.

So I’m increasingly convinced that Darryl Cooper is a genuine menace. If he’s going to be the new public face of WWII “revisionism,” it’s basically a given that he’s going to beclown the entire enterprise. There’s every reason to think he’ll pull the same discrediting crap with WWII that he’s already provably done with Jeffrey Epstein.

According to a recent New York Times profile of Cooper, “he has the most subscribed-to history newsletter on Substack.” And for a period following Cooper’s March 13, 2025 appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Cooper’s signature podcast Martyr Made “was the seventh-most popular podcast on Spotify.” This is all very bleak. Notably, Cooper played a family-related emotional blackmail card with that NYT profile as well, opting to preemptively publish on Substack his emailed responses to journalist Joe Bernstein, because in the past Cooper said he has “had to calm [his] grandmother” when unnamed media outlets reported hurtful things about him. And this experience made him “more than a little shy around reporters.”

Yeah, I definitely can see why Cooper has gotten “more than a little shy.”

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